The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  Nodding, Pip studied her features again, realising exactly where she’d seen that striking masculine nose before. Facebook. With over three thousand friends and a very active profile, Lady Roo Verney was a self-styled animal-communicator, anti-cruelty activist and vociferous social media-ite. She was also the last person Pip knew to have had contact with Verity online.

  ‘Would you like a lift?’ she offered eagerly.

  ‘That makes you the fucking love of my life right now. Fast as you can! I’m Prunella Verney by the way.’ She shook Pip’s hand so firmly that Pip could hardly feel it to put the key in the ignition. ‘Call me Roo.’

  Setting off, dog on the back seat, gulping even louder and smelling rancid, Pip excitedly made the connection: ‘You’re Verity’s niece!’

  ‘You know Aunt Vee?’ She was filming out of the passenger window. They could see the red coats of the hunt staff moving in the valley, charging along a track beside the woods, the horn blowing long, repeated notes. ‘Hounds are on the wrong scent.’

  ‘How is Vee?’ Pip asked, adopting her best caring tone.

  ‘She has her good days. Mummy still visits, but old age is a finger up the backside, isn’t it?’ Especially when you’re, you know, fucked.’ Her face contorted, teeth bared and eyes rolled upwards in a death mask.

  Pip didn’t entirely understand – was she saying Verity was pegging out? – but she nodded, with a sympathetic hum, wondering if Roo had some form of Tourette’s. She certainly had no volume control. It was like being in the car with a female Brian Blessed.

  ‘How’s her horse?’ she asked.

  ‘That bloody psycho doesn’t help one bit,’ Roo boomed. ‘The family would have shot it, if it wasn’t so valuable. All Blair’s fault, of course. Bloody buggery man. Brake! I need to film this.’ They shuddered to a halt beside a thin patch of hedge and rail and she leaned out of the window to pan across as a quad-bike zoomed over the stubble, switching between commentary and conversation: ‘And here we see a terrier man going in...Vee dotes on them both unfortunately... The terriers will dig a fox from earth to shred it limb from limb... Of course the horse is totally wasted on Vee.’

  Pip had to play this carefully. The camera was rolling so she didn’t want anything incriminating recorded, but it was too good an opportunity to waste. ‘She could always sell him back to his dealer, couldn’t she?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Roo muttered, zooming in on the quad. ‘Most horse dealers I know are total fucking crooks. Loathsome bunch. How do you know my aunt again?’

  ‘I... was researching a book,’ she improvised quickly. ‘For my best friend Petra Shaw. She’s an—’

  ‘I know who she fucking is! Love all that Regency lesbian eroticism she rocks off. Is she gay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What a bloody shame. Huge LGBT following. She knows her way around scissoring.’

  ‘She does all her cutting on computer, these days,’ said Pip, misunderstanding.

  Roo put her camera down to peer out at the distant field. ‘Bugger! I’ve pissing well lost them behind the wood. Drive!’ she ordered, sitting back as the car set off again. ‘Yes, I’ll bet old Vee gave you lots of shaggingly good stuff. Even when she can’t remember her own name, she can still recite the bloody story about being related to Katherine Ferrers, the Wicked Lady herself. I bet all that casting off one’s corsets to disguise oneself as a highwayman is right up Petra’s alley. Is that what the next book’s about?’

  ‘It’s a loose retelling,’ Pip said vaguely, making a mental note to cross-check dates. ‘I wrote to your aunt very recently but I heard nothing back.’

  ‘Was it typed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then of course you bloody wouldn’t. She thinks anything typed is a bill and it goes straight in the bin, always has. Worse than ever, these days, of course. What are they fuck-meisteringly doing?’ She lifted the camera again and filmed through the windscreen as Pip racketed along to the stud entrance, in which the car-followers’ muddy convoy was parked up. ‘Here we see deliberate obstruction,’ she told the sound recording.

  The bulldog man was trying to block their way, standing in the middle of the lane, arms out.

  ‘Keep twat-buggery driving!’ Roo hissed to Pip.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Doing as she was told, Pip put her foot down. There definitely wasn’t enough room to get past. Like a tree rooted deep in the tarmac, Bulldog Man stood his ground then, eyes bulging, screamed. Covering her own eyes, Roo screamed too. The dog threw up the remains of twelve cupcakes on the back seat. Pip kept the pedal flat to the metal. She banked the verge, bounced past him and pelted on.

  Roo peered out from between her fingers. ‘Did you fucking well run over him?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Then she started to giggle. ‘Sorry, did you want me to?’

  Roo was gazing at her in wonder. ‘What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘Pip.’

  Joining in the infectious laughter Roo thrust her head out of the window and looked back at the fist-waving foot-followers, flicking up two fingers. Then she collapsed back in her seat and whistled. ‘Ever thought of becoming a hunt monitor, Pip?’

  ‘I’d lose my job.’

  ‘Ah, yes, at the stud, you said. Aunt Vee asked me to communicate with that loony stallion of hers once. Brain-fuckingly mixed up, poor chap. Told me he wanted to be called Moon and live a natural barefoot life running with mares on high pasture, but Vee was having none of it. Silly old bird’s so frightened he’ll end up in the wrong hands. Stop the chuffing car!’ she demanded, as they passed the gate into the church meadows. ‘I’ll go on foot from here. Thank you so fucking much, bubs. Here are all my taglines.’ She fished in the Puffa for a card striped with social-media addresses. ‘Friend me and I’ll friend you back. If you want to be more than friends, I’ll take you out to fucking dinner sometime.’ The blue eyes softened and then she was gone.

  It took Pip a moment to realise she’d just been propositioned.

  She couldn’t go to the stud until the foot-followers had moved on, and even then she was a marked woman. Now this. Her first lesbian date offer. The first time she’d been asked out by anyone, in fact. Ex-husband Ali following her to Tesco Metro after work every day for a month didn’t really count. By the fourth week they’d been holding hands in the frozen-food aisle.

  ‘I like sexy men with tattoos!’ she told the dog, in the rear-view mirror. And yet it felt so nice to be asked to dinner. She licked her lips, tossed her hair back and drove on into the village like Portia de Rossi in a drag-racer.

  Anxious not to encounter the hunt foot-followers again, Pip took the puking pointer to the Old Almshouses to wait it out together until they moved on. It was the ideal opportunity to check the place over as part of her Home from Home Comforts service, she decided. Besides, she didn’t want to be confined in a car with the smell of dog sick and fox poo a moment longer. She had a new Tinder profile half composed in her head.

  Sleuth with a sweet tooth seeking missing link with inks. Show me your stamp collection, big boys...

  It had a nice romantic ring about it.

  *

  Until now, Fitz hadn’t investigated the phone his father had given him much beyond the app. As soon as he’d discovered that, it had transformed into a portal to an adult world he didn’t understand, a handle to a twisted dystopian place beyond the safety net of weekend leave and school holidays. It was a magnifying glass that showed up every flaw in his mother’s over-jolly pretence that all was well. With it in his possession, Fitz was no longer fooled into believing the Gunns were anything other than loaded and on a hair trigger. His father had unwittingly handed him a weapon that could destroy them all, and he could see straight through its sights, like an assassin.

  His Duke of Edinburgh award paramour, Sophie, who was heavily into horoscopes – Fitz had to tolerate a lot of yada about it in messages before she’d Snapchat a bra shot – told him he was a
typical Scorpio: super-sexy and secretive, which he liked, thinking it very Bond. She was a Pisces, sensitive, intuitive and giving.

  His mother was Gemini, a Jekyll and Hyde character, as charming and forthright in public as she could be dark-souled in private. For the first sixteen years of his life, Fitz had adored Petra’s happy face and found the other frightening, but the app had changed that. Now it was the opposite: he found her publicly rather embarrassing, but privately fascinating.

  Leaving his sisters playing an elaborate Fort Boyard-themed game around the climbing frame, he slipped inside his mother’s Plotting Shed.

  When journalists came to interview Petra Shaw – which they very rarely did now – they were usually disappointed to find her workspace more like a messy undergraduate’s digs than a romantic garret. Granted, the bookshelves were crammed with fittingly dusty tomes, which served now as decorative memorabilia, faced with a veneer of photographs, greetings cards and knick-knacks. There were fairy lights and disco balls, mementoes from student holidays, postcards, a cinematic lightbox over a window hung with Orla Kiely curtains, and a lot of Black Beauty-themed ephemera. It wasn’t a historian’s ivory tower, it was a time capsule dating back to her happiest era. Petra Shaw BC. Before Charlie.

  He glanced out of the window to check his sisters were still setting adventure tasks for one another across the monkey bars. Above it, the letters of his mother’s lightbox were arranged to say, ‘JUST BLOODY WRITE IT!’

  Fitz had figured out that his mother’s career had been in decline pretty much from the day she’d married, however brightly she spun it. She’d had two bestsellers before he was born, another shortly afterwards that was later adapted as a movie. For a brief period while he was at prep school her minor celebrity kudos had made him a popular play-date for children whose mums wanted to get to know her. By boarding school he’d been too embarrassed about all the sex scenes and lace on the jackets to tell people what she did, and now that he was old enough to be proud of her, nobody knew who she was.

  He slumped in her creaking office chair, closing his eyes. Would Petra Shaw be better off without Charlie Gunn? The jury was out. To his parents’ credit, they’d seemed pretty loved up in Italy, so much so he’d been forced to avert his gaze from the horror that was parental snogging – but Fitz was absolutely certain they’d all be better off without Lozzy on the scene. His mission to bring that one down hadn’t got going yet.

  Petra no longer went to launch parties or on foreign tours. She’d once told Fitz that writing kept the wolf from the door, but as far as he could tell the wolf had climbed through the window while she wasn’t looking. She was still frantically working away, pretending it wasn’t there. Her books didn’t sell many copies now, attracting a smattering of loyal readers’ online reviews at most. When they’d flown to Italy, there hadn’t been a single Petra Shaw novel in any of the airport bookshops. She’d predictably made light of it, pretending not to mind. ‘They’ve obviously sold out!’

  To Fitz’s chagrin, his father had seen it as a Team Gunn failure. ‘Need to get onto those publishers of yours and tell the sales people to pull their fingers out. Don’t be so wet with them.’

  Charlie Gunn was also a Scorpio. This worried Fitz a great deal. Being secretive and sexy wasn’t Bond-like in his father’s case. It was just secrets and lies.

  He pulled the phone out of his pocket, starting it up, wincing at the now all-too-familiar chords accompanying the glowing logo. Deliberately ignoring the app, he set about getting to grips with the way it worked, its odd interface far less user-friendly than his mother’s ancient iPhone. Nothing he saw improved his opinion of his father, from the multiple gem-based games to the reactionary news feeds. He’d also left a media card in it with lots of photographs. Holy shit. How many pictures of his own penis could a man take?

  Hey, old man. He texted one to Charlie now to wind him up. Who were you pleased to see? Taking the piss was small scale, compared to the all-out incendiary device he had in his hands.

  When it pinged, he thought it was his dad replying, but instead it was the moment Fitz Gunn felt himself turned from boy to man.

  Carly’s WhatsApp avatar was a photograph of a foal with a white face and a blue eye.

  Don’t like Godmilf.

  Too Oedipal for you? he replied

  Just fucking rude.

  I’m Perseus not Oedipus.

  I don’t care if you’re Maximus Decimus Meridius, don’t you ever milf me again. This is strictly platonicus, poshboy. Here for advice if you need it. Anything else – random texts, sexting, selfies or telling me I look good – you’re b-a-d, banned and deleted.

  Fitz smiled, suddenly feeling a whole lot better than he had in weeks. He might still need to slay Lozzy the Gorgon, but the fiercest goddess in the village had his back.

  27

  Petra had plugged her earphones into her mobile and was listening to her eighties playlist as she walked, ‘Everything But The Girl’ first in the shuffle. She wanted to clear her head totally, marching up the track that ran around the side of the big crop field behind the farmhouse to the top of the stud’s land, a shortcut to the bridleway up to the ridge.

  But her head refused to clear, and talking to herself was a writer’s madness she’d suffered for years. Imaginary conversations were her mainstay.

  First she rehearsed an altercation with Charlie: ‘You can’t keep things like this from me! Why didn’t you talk to me about it? But, of course, we don’t talk about ourselves any more. Just outside stuff.’

  In her ears, Cyndi Lauper started shouting that money changes everything.

  ‘And money. Thank you, Cyndi. We must talk about money. We know the overdraft’s not getting any smaller. Our pensions are minuscule, the mortgage is interest only. We can’t afford for you to live in London all week if work’s so thin on the ground. Should we let the flat? Or sell it? Oh, God, then I’d have you home all week again. No, let’s not do that. I’ll just write a bestseller. I’m on it. This conversation never happened.’

  She skipped music tracks to some mellower Cocteau Twins, imagining she was waving Charlie gratefully off on the train and driving back to have that lunch with Bay in which he showed her how well he handled a Gunn. She was magically transformed into Rachel Weisz, her voice cracking with intimacy: ‘You know exactly what I mean when I say this has to stop, Bay, and don’t pretend otherwise. This flirting thing, this mutual attraction. We both feel it, and nothing can happen. The heaven is in the temptation, not the submission. But, my goodness, I want to submit. A novel,’ she laughed under her breath, ‘a bloody good novel full of amazing, life-changing sex. Lie-back-and-take-it, seduce-me-now pleasure. The sort of sex I want to have with you but can’t.’

  ‘GEORGE!’

  ‘Jesus!’ She pulled out an earpiece and swung round.

  ‘GEORGE!’ A woman’s voice was shouting just the other side of a field hedge jewelled with brambles. Deep, husky and unmistakably Ronnie Percy’s.

  Petra felt a little spark of cheer. Then she heard a man’s voice, deep as a stag’s bark. ‘George! Where the fuck is he?’

  ‘Not here!’ she called out helpfully, although she supposed George could be a pet hamster for all she knew.

  Nevertheless she heard a cheery ‘Thanks!’ come back.

  Feeling like a good citizen, she checked Wilf was happily stalking rabbits in the stubble up ahead and plugged her earphones back in.

  As Petra marched on, she found Ronnie and her companion were inadvertently keeping pace on the opposite side of the hedge, repeated loud cries of ‘George’ penetrating Adele. Then she heard a hearty ‘Hello there! It’s my ally!’

  The ground on the far side of the hedge was on a rise that had lifted Ronnie into sight, her blonde head turning in delight. Behind her, a brooding Indiana Jones type was casting dark eyes across the horizon.

  ‘Oh, hello!’ Petra feigned surprise, pulling the buds conspicuously from her ears. ‘Sorry! Loud music. I was just—’


  ‘Are his balls still on?’ Ronnie interrupted urgently, as Wilf came bounding over, barking loudly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The spaniel.’ She cocked her head towards frantic yapping in the hedge line further ahead. ‘Here come my girls. Olive’s on heat.’

  ‘No balls,’ Petra reassured her, as one of Ronnie’s small black and tan dogs shot out through the hedge, shrill barks ringing out. While Olive and Wilf launched into an elaborate body-wagging, jumping dance, like a pair of sixties groovers, the very elderly, grey-muzzled dog Petra remembered from the farm-shop encounter also lumbered out of the undergrowth. She turned back to look at her mistress with cataract-misted eyes, clearly expecting her to fight her way through the hedge too.

  ‘That’s Enid,’ Ronnie introduced her. ‘She and Olive are great rounder-uppers, hopeless picker-uppers. I had a terrific spaniel like yours once, softest mouth in the world. Softest head too. Remind me, is he working?’

  ‘Actively job-seeking. My husband shoots. Wilf usually eats and leaves, but Charlie’s determined to get his gundog boot-camp investment back.’

  ‘Of course, the man who wants to get in with the Name and Game Droppers. This is Blair, by the way.’ She introduced Indiana Jones. ‘Blair, this is...’ She pressed her forefingers to her head, screwing up her blue eyes. ‘Don’t tell me, I’ll get there...’

  ‘Petra.’

  ‘Petra from the village, a good ally of mine.’ She gave Petra a grateful wink.

  Indie nodded broodily, muttering an apology, and headed away towards the woods.